Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Window on Eurasia: Moscow Patriarch Says His Church’s Canonical Territory Includes All Former Soviet Republics – Plus China and Japan

Paul
Goble

Staunton, April 30 – Patriarch Kirill
says that the Russian Orthodox Church’s canonical territory currently includes
all the countries that had been part of the USSR plus China and Japan, and his
aides say that it could expand to include other countries where the Russian
Church has taken the lead in missionary activity.

Archpriest Igor Yakimchuk, secretary
of the Patriarchate’s council for relations with Orthodox churches, told the
magazine that the term “canonical territory” is now used quite frequently, it
has only recently been given definition in the Russian Church by a decision of
senior clerics earlier this year.

The term itself is “formally lacking
in traditional canonical texts,” he said, but “the absence of the term does not
mean the absence” of an understanding of the idea. Indeed, the canonical
borders of the Russian Orthodox Church are referred to at church councils of
the Eastern patriarchates as early as 1590 and 1593.

The ancient church did not need the concept,
Yakimchuk continued, because there did not exist major formations larger than
individual parishes or bishoprics, “but with time, larger structures began to
be formed, and the necessity arose of canonically regulating the borders among
them.”

The Eastern churches generally assumed the
borders they have today in the Byzantine period, he said, but “the church
borders of this or that Church can be broadened” to other territories where
they have conducted missionary work. That is why China and Japan are part of
the Russian Church’s canonical territory.

Another
“important moment” related to this, Yakimchuk said, is that the canonical space
of a church is based on territory rather than statehood. “States may disappear
or appear, their borders may contract or expand, but these changes do not mean
the automatic shift of church borders.”

Asked what happens when “historically
a certain territory belongs now to one patriarchate and then to another,” such
as for example in Bessarabia, the patriarchate official said that chronology is
defining: “If in the course of 30 or more years, the borders between two” such
churches “are not disputed, they cannot be changed unilaterally.”

As far as Western Europe concerned, the
situation is still confused. A century ago, Yakimchuk said, “no one could
imagine” that there would be “hundreds of Orthodox congregations.” But now
there are, and to whom they should be subordinate will be the subject of an
upcoming Universal Orthodox Assembly.

Opinion on this subject is divided
between those who support the right of any autocephalous church to control the
parishes near it and those who believe that there should be a more rational
division of labor among the traditional Orthodox churches of the world. The
Moscow Patriarchate favors the former position, but believes it must emerge “naturally”
rather than by fiat, a process that will “require not a little time and
patience.”